This site has been inspired by the work of Dr David Korten who argues that capitalism is at a critical juncture due to environmental, economic and social breakdown. This site argues for alternatives to capitalism in order to create a better world.

As you read this, a monster of a bill is passing smoothly and quietly
through Britain’s parliament. It’s so big and complex, and covers so
many topics, that it makes a mockery of democracy.

The Infrastructure Bill
epitomises the rising trend of legislation-stuffing: cramming so many
unrelated issues into one bag that parliamentary votes become
meaningless.

MPs must either accept this great bundle of unrelated
measures in its entirety or reject it in its entirety. So laws can pass
which no one in their right mind would have voted for. Bills like this are good places for burying bad news, and this one is a graveyard.

Among its outrageous and scarcely-debated provisions, slipped in by
the government some time after parliamentary debates began, is a measure
that undermines every claim it has made about preventing dangerous
climate change. It is a legal obligation on current and future
governments to help trash the world’s atmosphere.

The government already has a legal obligation to do the opposite. The Climate Change Act 2008,
supported by all the major parties, commits successive governments to
minimise the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. The Infrastructure Act 2015
will commit successive governments to maximise them.

Needless to say, that’s not quite how it is expressed. The bill obliges governments to produce strategies for “maximising the economic recovery of UK petroleum”:
in other words for getting as much oil out of the ground as possible.
Oil is extracted to be burnt; burning it releases greenhouse gases;
maximising recovery means maximising greenhouse gases.

The Infrastructure Act, if passed - and so far it is scarcely being
contested (hello Labour, do you still exist?) - is the Climate Change
Act’s evil twin. Both acts oblige current and future governments to
report at fixed periods on how they will achieve their contradictory
objectives.

The same person, the secretary of state for energy and
climate change, will be responsible for both policies: ensuring that the
UK both consumes less oil and produces more. Perhaps he’ll seek to
minimise climate change by day, then, after a stiff dose of potion, come
out at night to maximise it.

But there could not be a greater contrast between the ways in which
the two acts (or their relevant clauses) were developed. The Climate
Change Act was the result of a massive campaigning effort, over many
years, by citizens’ movements that mobilised public opinion and pressed
MPs to act on it.

The provisions in the Infrastructure Bill were slipped
surreptitiously into the back of a legislative juggernaut that was
already rolling down a six-lane motorway. In other words, the first act
was an example of how democracy is supposed to work; the second is an
example of how it gets corrupted.

Now, on the day that MPs sit down in committee to discuss this bill, Nature publishes the most detailed scientific paper yet
on how much fossil fuel should be left in the ground if we’re to have a
chance of preventing more than two degrees of global warming.

To deliver a 50% probability (which is not exactly reassuring) of no
more than 2° of warming this century, the world would have to leave
two-thirds of its fossil fuel reserves unexploited.

I should point out that reserves are just a small fraction of
resources (which means all the minerals in the Earth’s crust). The
reserve is that proportion of a mineral resource which has been
discovered, quantified and is viable to exploit in current conditions:
in other words that’s good to go.

The Nature paper estimates that a third of the world’s oil
reserves, half its gas reserves and 80% of its coal reserves must be
left untouched to avert extremely dangerous levels of global warming.
Two degrees is dangerous enough; at present we are on course for around
five by the time the century ends, with no obvious end in sight beyond
2100.

The only sensible response to such findings, which some of us have
been advocating for years, is a global agreement to leave these
unburnable fossil fuels in the ground. But it’s not just that no such
agreement exists, no such agreement has ever been mooted.

Researching Don’t Even Think About It,
which I see as the most important book published on climate change in
the past few years, George Marshall discovered that there has not been a
single proposal, debate or even position paper on limiting fossil fuel
production put forward during international climate negotiations.

“From the very outset fossil fuel production lay outside the frame of
the discussions and, as with other forms of socially constructed
silence, the social norms among the negotiators and policy specialists
kept it that way.”

I would guess that it is not altogether inconvenient for governments
to ignore the role of fossil fuel companies in causing climate change.

While most states have not taken the astonishing, ecocidal step of
making it a legal obligation, almost all are pursuing the same policy as
the United Kingdom: maximising the production of fossil fuels. And
almost all pay lip service to the idea of minimising greenhouse gas
emissions.

There is no attempt to resolve this contradiction, or even to
acknowledge it. They don’t have to. They know that it will resolve
itself. If the stuff keeps coming out of the ground, it will be burnt,
without regard to the feeble policies seeking to limit its consumption.

I believe I might have been the first person to suggest in the media
that the best means of addressing climate change is to leave fossil
fuels in the ground, in a Guardian column in 2007. Since then, this solution has been championed by the indefatigable Bill McKibben, through his Do the Math tour and 350.org, and it has been picked up by many other organisations.

But still our politicians pretend not to hear. Even the current
secretary of state for energy and climate change in the UK, Ed Davey,
who is often fairly responsive, blocks his ears and sings loudly when
the crashing contradictions in his role are mentioned.

Otherwise, how
could he creep out at night to reverse the policies he pursues by day?
Like Dr Jekyll, he could not live with himself if he was fully aware of
what Mr Hyde was doing.

Were the world’s governments to regulate the wellhead rather than
just the tailpipe, logistically the task would be a thousand times
easier. Instead of trying to change the behaviour of 7 billion people,
they would need to control just a few thousand corporations.

These companies would buy permits to extract fossil fuels in a global
auction. As a global cap on the amount of fossil fuel that could be
burnt came into force, the price would rise, making low carbon
technologies, such as wind, solar and nuclear, much better investments.
The energy corporations would then have no choice but to start getting
out of dirt and into clean technologies.

The money from the auction
could be used either to compensate poorer nations for not following us
down the coal hole or to help them survive in a world in which some
dangerous warming - but hopefully no more than 2° - will inevitably
occur.

For 23 years, governments have been wasting precious time by pursuing
an unworkable solution. Perhaps that was their intention. But if the
climate talks in Paris in December are to have any meaning or purpose,
they should abandon the self-defeating policy of addressing only
consumption, and concentrate on restricting production. This, I believe
should be the focus of our campaigns.

Through groups like 350.org, we
must make this such a potent electoral issue that we drag governments
out of the clutches of the fossil fuel industry.

You think that’s tough? Well try the alternative: living in a world
with 5° of global warming, in other words a world of climate breakdown.
By comparison, almost anything looks easy.